Austrian police arrested two Russians from Chechnya after the discovery of the body of a Chechen dissident who was hit by bullets. The 43-year-old man, a critical voice of the Chechen regime and who had requested political asylum, was found dead on Saturday near Vienna.
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Police arrested a 48-year-old Russian in the town of Linz, some 200 km from Vienna, shortly after the macabre discovery. A second Russian, 37, from Austria, was arrested on Sunday. Police and the judiciary said the investigation was continuing and it was too early to decide the reason for the murder. The dissident - identified by the Austrian prosecution as Martin B. - had testified in 2017 in a murder case in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry told AFP. In this case, a volunteer soldier accused of plotting to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin was injured in a gun attack near Kiev. His wife had been killed.
The dissident's death in Austria comes against a background of growing concern for the safety of Chechen dissidents in exile. In February, Toumso Abdourakhmanov, a Chechen blogger critical of Ramzan Kadyrov, pro-Kremlin authoritarian leader in this small Russian Caucasian republic, was attacked in Sweden. A month earlier, Imran Aliev, a 44-year-old blogger, had been found dead in a hotel room in Lille (northern France). He had been stabbed 135 times. In Austria, the Chechen dissident Umar Israilov was killed on a street in Vienna in 2009.
